Australian politics has sunk to such a low point that stepping away for only a few days is enough to return and find the national debate sprawled in the mud.
I spent the latter part of last week at a university conference focused on leadership, sound judgment and the seriousness of institutions. The irony was hard to miss. At the same time, the Prime Minister was offering what looked like a lesson in political immaturity.
Over the course of one week, Anthony Albanese exposed more about his political instincts than he may have meant to. Speaking at the NSW Labor conference, he presented himself as a courageous reformer, a leader with the “ticker” to make difficult decisions on tax.
Yet almost at the same moment, Australians were being treated to an unedifying podcast appearance in which the PM responded to questions about who he would “shag” if his marriage went “tits up”, before discussing “bonking” his wife after a South Sydney win because, he suggested, a Rabbitohs victory can be a powerful “aphrodisiac”.
At the party conference, Albo told Labor supporters that leaders who lack ticker merely “kick the can down the road”. Real leadership, he insisted, is about doing “the hard thing”.
That is an extraordinary boast from a leader who did not have the political nerve to put his tax changes before voters at an election. Less than a year before revealing his planned overhaul of negative gearing and capital gains, he was not being upfront with the electorate. He was denying that the agenda existed at all. The can was pushed safely past polling day, with the details held back until the ballots were in and the political danger had passed.
That is not bravery; it is expedience wrapped in spin. It is also a post-election rewrite of events being sold as courage.
To shield that manoeuvre, Albo brushed off his detractors as generating “barely coherent noise”. It is the instinctive response of a leader trying to diminish legitimate examination.
Albanese and his wife Jodie Haydon at the weekend. No one expected the Prime Minister’s comments about sex to dominate the news cycle this week
Yet the critics aren’t merely partisan hacks or furious landlords. They include Ken Henry, a former Treasury secretary and titan of tax reform, Harvard-trained economist Professor Richard Holden, and business groups warning about investment, productivity and housing supply.
The alarm is even coming from inside the Labor Party: Cabinet Secretary Andrew Charlton has conceded the capital gains changes do not interact well with start-ups and small businesses, while NSW Premier Chris Minns warns of bracket creep and a suffocating tax burden. These are serious people raising serious objections.
If the Prime Minister is searching for barely coherent noise, he need only rewind his own podcast audio.
Replete in a T-shirt, straining with the effort of appearing relatable to the youth demographic, Albo was asked his contingency plan for a collapsed marriage. The escape route was obvious. He could have laughed it off, cited his vows, or simply refused to play along.
Instead, he leaned in, almost instantly.
Our PM is no political novice ambushed by a rogue host. He’s sat in Parliament – successfully not answering questions since 1996. He’s spent three decades mastering the dark arts of deflection, evasion and filibustering. In Question Time, he can dodge a policy interrogation for minutes on end. Refusing to even answer questions when directed to answer them by the Labor Speaker. Yet handed a juvenile sex question about a pop star, Albo answered in seconds.
That was a choice. He willingly lowered the highest office in the land to locker-room banter.
There is something uniquely pathetic about politicians who mistake vulgarity for authenticity. Albo assumes that dressing down and submitting to low-grade internet content makes him appear human. It merely makes him look small, and worst of all, the office shrinks with him.
Subjecting the highest elected office in the land to vulgarity like this just makes Albanese look small
His subsequent apology only compounded the indignity of it all. When the outrage erupted, uniting left, right, women and ordinary voters repulsed by the spectacle, he didn’t face the cameras to explain himself. Albo retreated behind a written statement, which, I’m told, he was reluctant to even issue.
This PM demands credit for the courage to break an election promise, yet lacked the courage to pitch it to voters beforehand, and lacked the courage to defend his own personal conduct.
This is the defining pathology of Albo’s leadership. He invokes courage only after the moment for it has passed, rebrands delayed honesty as reform, dismisses expert critiques as incoherent noise, confuses vulgarity with relatability and written statements with accountability.
No wonder voters are desperate for a viable alternative.
The podcast fiasco wasn’t a mere communications misstep, it exposed the exact same weakness driving his tax agenda. It is a compulsion to take the easy option, then retrospectively dress it up as principle.
That’s not leadership, it’s cowardice.
If Albo is still hunting for the real ‘barely coherent noise’ in Australian public life, he can stop looking at the economists, Treasury veterans, Labor premiers and party colleagues dissecting his tax policy.
He should look instead at the Prime Minister of Australia, grinning into a microphone, explaining who he would shag if his marriage went ‘tits up’.
Stay classy, Albo.
